Alexander finally gave up-she assumed he had been backtracking the cat-and came in. Karen double-checked the locks again, and rebuilt the tower of pots. Alexander followed her from room to room whuffling irritably. He knew he was entitled to a dog biscuit but Karen held off giving it to him until after he had gone upstairs with her.

In the dream that quickly seized her she was picking her way across a landscape covered with tumbled ruins, cyclopean columns, and fallen blocks of stone. The stones were carved with reliefs; but though she examined them with an absurd and nightmarish intensity, she could not make out their meaning. At last, dim in the purple distance, she caught a glimpse of some intact structure towering high above the plain. She ran toward it. A tottering column crumpled and collapsed; the fragments struck the earth, not with a solid thud, but ringing like metal.

The dog's barking shot her out of sleep, every muscle knotted. Alexander was at the window. The scraping of his claws on the glass made her skin crawl.

Karen fumbled for the lamp. It seemed to take forever to find the switch. The dog was getting frantic. He ran to the door, clawed at it, trotted back to the window.

The cat, Karen thought. He must have heard the cat. Siamese have loud voices. Audible through closed windows, the hum of air-conditioning?

Clinging to the idea of the cat as to a lifeline, she got out of bed and went to the window.

The mist had condensed into a layer of solid fog. The roofs and chimneys of the houses on the street behind the garden were invisible; nearer shapes shone ghostly, soft gray tree trunks pearly with wet, garden chairs gleaming like silver thrones in the glow of the lights by the back door.

Something was sitting in one of the chairs.

It was on the terrace, close enough to the lights so that she should have been able to identify the shape that occupied it-filled it, rather, like a giant featherbed that had been punched and pummeled into a rough imitation of a human form. It might have been the fog that softened its outlines so that they appeared to melt into nothingness.

Alexander was still trying to bark, but he was so short of breath the sound came out in weird little squeaks. It was probably this touch of low comedy that kept Karen on her feet. The sound that came from her taut throat was a rather pathetic echo of Alexander's squeak, but she meant it for laughter, and the hands she raised hardly shook at all. She unfastened the window and threw up the sash.

The thing in the chair rose up and drifted across the yard. It was quite opaque. However, its means of locomotion were as uncanny as its general appearance, for it seemed to float, without haste, threading a path around the rose bushes and the trees until it was swallowed up by the fog.

Alexander ran to the door.

I can't open it, Karen thought.

But neither could she remain in her room without knowing what might be outside the locked door. Alexander sounded like one of his own squeaky toys, but his small size and shortness of breath did not deter him; he wasn't cowering or hiding. How could she, a member of a supposedly superior species, do less?

Karen unlocked the door, but she let Alexander go first. Not until she heard a horrible crash from the kitchen did she realize she had made a mistake. Alexander had flung himself head-long into the pile of assorted hardware, and now she would never know whether some or all of them had already fallen, producing the far-off ringing sound that had entered her dreams and had, perhaps, wakened Alexander from his.

The lights in the hall burned steadily. She took a poker from the set of fireplace tools and went out of the room.

By the time she reached the kitchen Alexander was pushing the pots around with his nose looking for something edible. He had clearly lost interest in going out. The door was locked.

She gave Alexander the treat he deserved and they went upstairs together. The dog was sound asleep within minutes, but Karen sat by the window looking out until the sounds of morning traffic began and sunrise brightened the blanket of fog muffling the garden.

KAREN sat at the dining room table. On it lay an antique petticoat she was shortening and altering for a customer who had been visibly disconcerted when the waistband didn't begin to go around her purportedly twenty-five-inch waist. Since the petticoat was too long anyway, the solution was simple-take off the waistband and shorten the garment from the top-but the execution was not so easy, for the measurements had to be accurate and the fabric of the new waistband had to match the time-softened muslin of the original.

The scrap of material Karen held in her hand was not designed to be a new waistband. It was the wrong shape and size-roughly triangular, about three inches at the base. Nor, unless her recently acquired knowledge of fabrics misled her, was it old. A polyester-and-cotton blend, brand new and unstained except for a smear of rust from the nail on which it had been caught. It might have been torn from a bed sheet.

Karen had found it that morning, hanging from a nail on the back fence. It was the only visible evidence that someone had been in the yard the night before. As Tony had pointed out, the garden was too neatly tended to take footprints.

Pat and Ruth had a part-time gardener who came several times a week. Apparently his working hours coincided with Karen's, for she had never set eyes on him. Perhaps the gardener would know if there was any sign of disturbance, but it was hardly worthwhile trying to locate him. She had no intention of telling anyone of the incident, including the police. They had already heard from her twice in the last two days, assuming Mr. Bates had passed on the information about Horton. It wasn't exactly a case of the boy who cried "wolf," for there had definitely been a wolf of sorts in her hallway; but she had a feeling the police would get a trifle blase about her complaints if she called them every day. Anyway, the scrap of cloth wasn't evidence-the police would probably think it had been torn from one of her laundered garments-and the story sounded worse than silly, it sounded demented. A ghost in the garden, lady? Well, you know these old Georgetown legends.

Her lips tightly set, Karen put the scrap in an envelope and laid it aside. There was no doubt in her mind that the affair had been designed for one purpose only- to frighten her. After trying the door and discovering he could not get in, the unknown had roused Alexander- perhaps he had thrown gravel at the window-and lingered until the light in her bedroom went on, so that she would be sure to see him. The fog had been a helpful but not essential adjunct to his performance; and the weather forecast would have informed him that some such meteorological phenomenon could be expected that night.

Instead of reducing her to a state of quivering terror, the incident had had precisely the opposite effect. She was getting tired of people trying to intimidate her; and a clumsy, childish trick like that one added insult to injury.

Rob was late to work. She had to unlock the shop herself. Damn him, she thought, surveying the unemptied ashtray on the front desk and the tumbled folders scattered across the table. It wouldn't have taken him five minutes to tidy up. She straightened the folders, observing that a scant half dozen of the Georgetown book remained. It had been selling like hot cakes, all right; Julie's cynical assessment had been accurate. Maybe I'd better have another look at it, Karen thought. Maybe I can find a nasty scandal about someone else I know. Not mentioning any names… Wouldn't it be funny if Shreve were anxious to retrieve Granny's things because somewhere in the lot was evidence of an antique misdemeanor Granny had committed?